This invention relates in general to visualizers and more particularly to a visualizer for composing composite illustrations.
Commposite illustrations have proved quite useful in such widely divergent fields as law enforcement, architecture, construction, and education, but perhaps the most familiar use is the construction of portraits by police agencies to apprehend criminal suspects. Heretofore, the procedure for constructing such composites has involved a series of individual overlays. For example, the overlay kit has numerous overlays for each of various facial features such as head shape, eyes, nose, hair, etc. The witness to a crime selects the overlays for each feature which he feels best match the corresponding features of the criminal he observed. When these ovelays are placed together, the resulting composite portrait should resemble the criminal suspect, but often it does not and the overlays must be changed. Handling and changing the overlays is a clumsy and time-consuming procedure. Futhermore, once a suitable composite portrait is obtained, the only practical method of disseminating it to other law enforcement personnel is to photograph the portrait and thereafter have it reproduced in multiple copies. This too is time-consuming and can also be quite expensive.